St. Patrick’s Day Shirts

Yes. I really think this was the best picture I got of my “models.” Aren’t they a silly crew!

Inspired by this post I found via “Be Different, Act Normal,” I thought a great application for this technique would be St. Patrick’s Day shirts, to insure my children against pesky St. Patrick’s Day pinching. This was a pretty quick and simple project, so you still have time to do your own before Wed., if you hurry.

I bought my kids’ solid colored green shirts at Target (Kira’s was a steal @ $1.75 on clearance–the others run about $5). The craft stores have blank t-shirts in a variety of colors, and I heard Walgreens has plain shirts on sale right now. I think Tessa’s would have worked better, if I could have found a darker green, but it is still cute, and feminine.

We spent the weekend at my MIL’s house. She recently bought a Cricut machine, I think partly to lure her daughters home to visit more often. 🙂 It made the project fairly simple, since I had the machine cut out all of the letters and heart shapes, so I could spray them at the same time.

I just used cardstock that she had on hand. We flipped the letters over, and sprayed them with a spray adhesive. (I should note that my protective husband did all of the chemical stuff, to protect me and my unborn child).

The spray adhesive worked nicely to hold the letters in place, but was a light enough bond, that they were easily repositioned, if necessary.

And then we started spraying the shirts with bleach. The original post said to spray up into the air, and let the bleach fall down onto the shirts. I was trying to get my husband to do this, so we could have a more subtle effect like the shirts on the post. But you can see on this one he is aiming directly at the shirt. So here is what we learned: You won’t see the bleach take effect immediately. If you are going for a subtle effect, spray a little and wait a few minutes to see how much you have on there.

In this photo you can see the bleach starting to take effect, though it was difficult in the lighting for us to tell if we had enough.

So our shirts turned out a lot more dramatic than I intended, but I still think they are fun, and, more importantly, should ward off pinchers. 🙂

Here is our St. Patty’s Day Parade of shirts:

I actually have some other shirts planned using this technique, for another special occasion. We’ll see if I can’t get the more subtle look on those.

Thanks you guys! Yeah, April, that is one of the things I thought to try the next go around. A better bottle with a finer mist might help, too. And a little more patience for the bleach to do its thing.

My son, niece and I did the same project last weekend…I used a large magnet I had on hand to trace the shamrock shapes onto freezer paper, cut the shapes out and then ironed it onto the shirts…my first try at using this technique to bleach designs onto t-shirts, and I'm so happy with the result!